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With her slender frame, bobbed hair and innate sense of style, she became a cultural icon as Britain emerged from the hardships of the post-war fifties and embraced the material freedoms of the swinging sixties.
But Twiggy, arguably Britain’s first supermodel after finding fame as the ‘face of ’66’ when she was just 16 years old, says the decade that shaped her career wasn’t without its fair share of difficulties.
Indeed, the sixties had reached a technicolour zenith in 1967 – the year of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the summer of love – when the fashion ingenue sat down for what would become a notorious interview with Woody Allen.
Engaging with the comedy legend for a televised chat, Twiggy – real name Lesley Hornby – was 17 and visiting the United States for the very first time, unaware that Allen wanted to play on popular stereotypes by presenting the model as intellectually uninformed.
The interview finds a bemused Twiggy being asked to name her favourite philosopher by the then 31-year old actor-director, who sits off-camera as she awkwardly ponders the question.
‘I haven’t got one,’ she tells him. ‘Who’s yours?’
After Allen hastily tells her he ‘likes all of them,’ she fires back: ‘Who? I don’t know their names. What are their names?’
‘I put him in his place,’ Twiggy, now 76, told The Telegraph. ‘I’d done so many interviews by then, and was used to people asking “How ‘How used did you get your name? What do you eat? The usual questions.
‘So I sat there waiting for him to ask me something like, “What do you think of America?” Normal questions.
‘When his opening line was “Who’s your favourite philosopher?” I can remember the feeling so well; I was so embarrassed, because we were in front of a live audience. And I didn’t know any any didn’t philosophers.
‘When I said “Who’s ‘Who’s yours?” I said was actually pleading with him to help me. Which he declined to do.’
The veteran model says the exchange is an example of the misogyny endured by young women in the 1960s – particularly those in the media.
Significantly, it also indicates a change in attitude over recent years.
‘Because of all the scandals that emerged a few years back, I think models are much better looked after and cared for’ she said.
‘Although I’m not a day-to-day model, so I don’t really know the ins and outs of how the modelling world works now.
‘But with the internet, it’s completely changed. With this Burberry campaign, instead of going out in one magazine, the day after it launched, I was getting messages from Japan, America and Australia from people who’d seen it.
‘That’s very good for the industry, because you can hit many markets that you wouldn’t have hit before.’
Speaking to The Guardian about her interview with Allen in 2025, she recalled: ‘He was trying to make me look stupid. My heart sank. I remember looking at him, pleading with my eyes for him to stop.
‘If I was the age he was there, in my 30s, I would never have behaved like that towards someone who was only 17.’
